


Kill Me If I Retreat

by grayglube



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5106155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees her like he did the first time</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ohyellowbird wanted me to write sad fic with her she wrote a seth/kate thing and I did this

He sees her like he did the first time, floating, something huge and vital behind her, blood and chlorine and the Mexican noontime sun, he was at the end of the line then, bank heist going bad, the voice and the vision of Santanico louder and brighter every hour, every mile closer, the blade in one hand and a hole in the other, never been worse for wear than that, until he got shot but by then the vision was a woman and he was feeling alright.

 

He’s seeing her now and she’s floating, but standing, not weightless but things are liquid, it’s a starry night in the desert and there’s something huge and vital behind her, formless and strange and her hair moves like she’s underwater, drowning. He’s listening to a sound and maybe he’s drowning too, it’s muffled and low, she’s looking at him now.

 

Not like the first time, floating, startled by the sound of his voice, confused because she hadn’t caught the question.

 

He asks the same question.

 

She stares, shuts her eyes and when she opens them, ‘What?’ Unstartled because she’s been watching him the whole time, eyes find eyes and there are a thousand and one sets wide open on him. A spider in the desert at night.

 

He asks if she’s alright. He’s been wondering if she still believes in God. He’s been trying hard to find the guy somewhere.

 

“You shouldn’t be here.” He says it like she should know better, she never did know better.

 

“Why not? I didn’t want to die.”

 

“God listened? Still a believer, then?”

 

“More than I was before." The wind is a far away shriek, "I get it now.” Her voice is flat, toneless. It’s inside his head. There are a thousand souls with open mouths behind her, formless and awful, and they are all screaming.

 

“God puts the world on mute when he’s trying to sleep.”

 

“Can you?”

 

He doesn’t know if he believes she’s made up, her body wasn’t where he left it, she’s never been buried and still it’s hard to tell if she’s _in_ his head or just _all_ in his head.

 

“Virgins are supposed to taste complex, and add all those souls…” he trails off on a whistle, dull in the dark, waiting for a reaction.

 

“No movie comparison of what you think I taste like? Like...an everlasting gobstopper.”

 

She gone, still present, but he can’t find her with his eyes, the night is all stars and no moonglow, the desert is black and windless, her fingers touch his stomach and her small palm flattens over his shirt buttons.

 

There’s warmth on his skin and her front against his back is warm, and wet, she smells like red meat, fresh and cut open, the distinctness of it through his shirt is like being shot again, being alive and a regular man.

 

“What’s safer than a vault only you know how to break into? A safe no one knows is actually a safe?” Her tone is soft, like Santanico's could be, but Kate's nails are short and rough where the other's were long and like wine.

 

“That what keeps you up at night?”

 

She is a grave. Quiet.

 

Something uncurls inside, closer than a lover, inside of him when he’s only ever been inside of someone, it’s turnabout and the small hand, placed so chastely, has what a goddess left behind for him to hold rolling through him, he’s warming quick, like a snake basking on a rock in the sun, getting set for a night without warmth.

 

“Not gonna lie, I’m at least half chub right now.”

 

It doesn’t put her off pace like he thought it would. She bleeds hotter across his back. There’s her breasts through it, the smell of her bleeding, and his slacks are tight across the front, a night dwelling rodent won’t slake the craving when wakes up from this.

 

“At night, usually, there’s this one bullet that tries to tear its way out of where it ended up and I can’t get it out, if the screaming doesn’t keep me up that does."

 

She sighs, he swallows.

 

Her hands moves low, her thumb between the space of his shirt buttons, "Anyone who knows it’s there can rip that thing right out of your belly, be careful.”

 

She’s gone.

 **  
**He wakes up and it’s night, he can hear everything, he’s sweating in bed, back damp and hair stuck on his brow, he puts a hand low on his body, expectant, inside something moves, he thinks of a woman, thinks of a girl and the bullet keeping her awake, souls lost and wandering in the desert at night. **  
**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Decided to continue this

“Eternal fate has turned its back on him.” Her tone is low, a brass instrument, the warning horn blowing, and her words seem like bible verse. It doesn’t seem like night yet, he’s drifting, tired, falling, lulled. His watch is missing. “It's two a.m.” She tells him.

 

He shouldn’t be asleep, maybe it’s the middle of afternoon where he is, the darkest part of night where she is. It can’t be the other way around.

 

She’s looking at the ground, long hair hanging down, “The fear is gone.” Her bare feet are dirty and her polish is chipped, some awful uncharacteristic shade of denim blue, even in the dark he can tell, in his dreams she even has a scent. “What are you doing here, Kate?”

 

“I'm sitting here waitin'”

 

They’re in Malvado’s chamber, he thinks of where else he’s seen her in his dreams, because they are just dreams, always, and she’s only ever shown up in places he’s seen for himself. The desert along the border where Santanico found Paloma, Jackknife Jed’s, sitting on the edge of the bed he shared with someone he thought loved him differently than they did.

“The gun's still warm,” she points, looking. His watch is gone but he’s hasn’t lost his six little friends all bundled up nice and snug, the gun is warm, on his knuckles he feels the imprint, _five_ little friends he amends. Whoever got it all riled up isn’t around, no sign of them on the floor or walls.

 

“There's a storm on the loose.” There’s a hole and the slow seep of her afterlife all over the front of her shirt. “Help,” she pleads, softly. She stumbles up and her feet leave prints in the dust, She smells like gun metal, sand, and diesel. The way she smells changes depending on the dream but tonight she smells like she did when she died. He’s trying to find words but his mouth just stays open, not wide enough for words because it feels like it did the night she died, their faces close, like fogging up a mirror.

 

“I'm steppin' into the twilight zone.” And the radio comes to life behind him, following her lead. He shuts his eyes and his eyebrows stretch his forehead up, there’s humor in her still. “Did you just monotone your way through golden earring? Little young for that top forty hit, huh?”

 

“Do you ever wonder if sometimes we’re listening to that same song on the radio?”

 

“I look up at the sky, all that universe. Stars.” He admits.

 

“The sky over Houston doesn’t compare to what I’m seeing.” She doesn’t say it nicely, it’s smug and he can’t figure out why.

 

His words are firm, he wants an answer. “Where are you?”

 

She comes back with some bite, “Not near you.” Her head tilts softly to the side. They’re at the well, spotlights like the main stage, lit like the gallows. He nods at it all, “You still acting like it’s my fault? You’re the one that tagged along, the one that ran down that hill, that wasn’t my fault.” He’s in her face, feels her exhales on the front of his throat.

 

“I killed my daddy in the belly of an ancient temple with monsters everywhere, he begged me to do it. I got shot and died. And if I ask _you_ where my brother is now you’ll tell me he’s on his way to Kansas City.

 

“Sorry you had to grow up quick kid.”

 

She ignores the invitation for real anger, takes the one for proving she’s right: “But, If you asked _me_ where my brother is right now I’d tell you he’s about to be scattered between the Red river and the state line on I Thirty-Five. So, fuck you.” It comes out crisp like fresh bank notes from a lifted vault.

 

Somewhere there _is_ a radio playing. It’s not loud but it’s a distraction from what she says and what he answers.

 

“Malvado said something that made sense when I spoke to him, you learn a lot about someone by what they give up to you as a sacrifice, Scott gave him you.” _I'm falling down a spiral, destination unknown. Double crossed messenger, all alone. “_ Don’t you think that might warrant some sort of karmic retribution?” _Can't get no connection, Can't get through where are you?_

_Well the night weighs heavy on his guilty mind this far from the borderline._ “You aren’t any safer now, you’re the king and you’re napping in an unlocked office. A king rules from his throne, Seth’s been sitting in yours. My brother is motivated by guilt, Seth's motivated by spite.”

_When the hit-man comes he knows damn well he has been cheated._

 

He wakes up, Seth is in the room, he wants to ask if he’s ever dreamed about her, Seth hasn’t and somehow he knows.

 

There's a call later, Scott thinks someone is following him, Richie tells him to throw the head out the window and forget about KC.

 

* * *

 

He’s somewhere he hasn’t been. She’s there too. It’s not really a dream. It’s a hotel room and there a water bottle with a peeled off label, filled with her blood on the nightstand next to the red digital clock numbers. She’s filling another by emptying the same syringe again and again. She doesn’t flinch when she sticks herself. He watches, he used to have a phobia but it’s been gone since Seth went to prison and it hasn’t come back.

 

It’s like picking a scab.

 

Her brother’s name is on the filled one.

 

He waits to see what she’ll write on the next.

 

She doesn’t write anything.

 

Before he wakes up she asks if he thought he was getting one. He says he didn’t and she says she believes him. “You were never greedy. Very fastidious. That’s why she left too, because you didn’t keep her satisfied.”

 

His grin is tight on his mouth, grim and fading fast.

 

“Did it ever feel like, when you were together,” she stops to stare at him, inclines her head down and stresses the word again, “together,” it doesn’t sound conspiratorial or vulgar, just cruelly juvenile and out of place in her mouth now that she’s not herself, “That she was hoping afterwards you might go out and bring home a decent meal?”

 

The words hurt, she wants them to. There’s dull aching recognition of the possibility too, that she's right, that he's wondered the same thing.

 

“Comfort, the absence of hunger, and no obligation for her existence to mean anything to anyone, that’s what she wanted.”

 

He wants to wake up. “That sounds like a lot of extrapolation to get from the wealth of time you spent with her.”

 

“We’ve been talking. She thinks I should be drained and left like a husk, dead again. I think she shouldn’t assume her opinion matters.”

 

She writes the name of the sun on the second bottle.

 

* * *

 

Her visits are like tightening the screws, another lash on his back, blood at his feet and it’s all his own, drawn by what feels like her fingernails.

 

Something else’s teeth.

 

Killing him by degrees, inch by inch, wasted words and unsolvable riddles.

 

Waiting for her to speak is worse than anything she has to say, he’s afraid she won’t say anything, if she won’t speak it means, maybe, that she can’t. If she can’t speak she’s just the ghost of a girl he’s helped kill, not real at all, not trapped, but ripped up and guts spilled on some lonely spot, angry and small and full of failings.

 

She's starting to feel less real.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will be posting more Kin stuff soon. For now enjoy this.

It’s the day before his first meeting of the Lords. He wishes he could talk to someone, he wishes someone would talk to him. They’re sitting at a table near the stage in the Titty Twister, they are alone in the silence and the dust, the world has ended in his dream. No one tells him but he knows.

 

They’ve been talking for a long time, the booze has been emptied from all the bottles, all that’s left is her blood and his resentment.

 

“You used to be weird and unlikable. Sitting and saying things that made people uncomfortable because you’d talk like an infomercial, and then you’d be offended when they wouldn’t buy it as believable. You’d touched things with just your fingertips, like picking up something dirty from the floor, tilting back when things leaned in.”

 

They’re playing a game, one where they tell the other all the things they’ve never had a chance to say because of polite manners.

 

“You hated celebrating at the places Seth picked. All herpes and ripped vinyl booths.”

 

She’s not wrong. She’s never wrong.

 

“I can see inside of you, when he went away and you went into the woods, before she came you lost something, you grieved, like a cancer patient who knows they’re going to die, things got bleak while you were alone.”

 

He wants to put his fangs in her. The world is dead. So are they.

 

“And now, look at you, putting your hands on things, really touching, being touched and not flinching like a maladjusted child,” her fist knocks shot glasses from their stacked glass pyramid, “ _quit fucking flinching, you little retard_!”

 

Her words are something his father might have said. Did say, because he doesn’t forget things. She looks at him like she’s heard a strange sound and isn’t sure where it’s come from, she’s listening.

 

She doesn’t have a pulse because her heart stopped, there’s no rise and fall to her chest because she doesn’t need the oxygen, the blood moves but not to a rhythm.

 

Finally she apologizes.

 

For not being quite herself. For saying awful things.

 

* * *

 

  

“Time doesn’t change much. It makes more of it.”

 

“Too much of a good thing.”

 

“A good man will be better, a bad man will be worse, you’re not a good man Richard. Can you see it yet?”

 

“See what?”

 

“What you’re going to do to Seth? To me?”

 

“I’m not going to hurt you Kate.”

 

“You won’t be able to tell the difference until I show you what you’ve done.

 

“You’re going to try to be a King, make me something they’re used to, not another La Diosa but something to feed them with, and I’m going to let you.”

 

“Why?”

 

She’s gone again.

 

* * *

 

 

 

“When god wakes up, what do you think he’ll do first?”

 

They lie in opposite directions, head to head, under a canopy of stars that look like pinpricks in the stage backdrop. The desert is warm under his shoulders. He’s naked, all scales, a snake in the sand. She’s dressed in her baptismal robe.

 

“What do you think?”

 

“I asked you, Kate.”

 

“What he does whenever he’s disappointed with us.”

 

“Start over.” He says it and is sure it’s the right answer.

 

“Kill everything,” her eyes are like an ocean, metallic and dead, her face turned towards his, “and everyone, and _then_ start over. Everything will shake and crack, like thunder from inside the earth and there will be fire, black, a scorched wasted place, he’ll hold it in his hand and break it open like an egg. He’s going to punish us, so we understand his mercy when he opens his hand and lets us go. Let us die.”

 

“…”

 

“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out, it will just go on, over and over again, for forever.”

 

“Are you naked underneath that table cloth?”

 

* * *

 

  

He’s fallen asleep, sated in his gut and in his balls, there’d been a waitress who acquiesced and came to his bed, he’d fucked her while half-dressed and then told her to go back to finish her shift. She’d gone with a smile. It’d made him world-weary.

 

“My dad like the old testament best.”

 

“My dad like Jim Bean.”

 

“I used to like revelations. But I’ve been reading Job again.”

 

“You’ll have to give me the cliff notes version.”

 

“Yeah, you’re a busy guy now.”

 

He grins until he looks at her face, there’s no smile, and she’s mocking him. In his irritation he chastises her. “Being the boss isn’t a part-time thing.”

 

“That sounds like something Seth would say.”

 

He’s brought to heel in ten words or less and she goes on.

 

“Job fails and God almost loses a bet with the devil. God strong-arms Job into repentance through shame, shame he shouldn’t feel because he’s been made that way, it’s not his fault, but that in itself, the _‘it not being his fault’_ shows how much God is in control, always in the right. Job repents for his questioning, or anger he shouldn’t have, because God is always right.”

 

“…”

 

“In the Bible God is always right. Because he’s a hero. He’ll kill your wife and children and curse you with disease but once he’s had the chance to shame you a final time and make you sigh, ready to die, he’ll give it back.”

 

“That’s rough.”

 

“Who could love God after that? God never bargains. What’s the point, in believing in something like that. Zero-sum stuff, you know?”

 

“Losing your religion Katie Cakes? What’s next, your virginity?”

 

“Think I’d let you take that from me?”

 

“I _am_ the best boxman since…”

 

There’s her harsh sigh cutting through like a store’s air conditioning through the balminess of summer heat through an open door next to a sidewalk.

 

“Do you _want_ to die?” He asks, neither of them are smiling anymore.

                               

“Something raised me up, but that doesn’t mean I’m alive anymore.”

 

* * *

 

 

They’re in a bedroom that must have been hers, but he blinks and everything is gone from it, like it’s moving day, all that’s left of her bedroom in a house she grew up in, in a place between their dreams, is the bed.

 

She’s over him on hands and knees, like a predator, like Alien, he corrects. Her teeth are very white, her smiles cracks her chapped bottom lip and a line of red wells in the center.

 

“I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going to…-” she starts, breathless.

 

“Hurt me?”

 

“I won’t hurt you.” She sounds like she’s agreeing.

 

“You’re packing heat,” his hands find her hips and push her to the side, away and off of him, “souls that scream for vengeance against culebras.”

 

She flops down, arms spread wide, “They believe if they sacrificed themselves that they would slake the thirst, save the world, all the people left. They’re angry.”

 

“You wouldn’t be? If you were lied to like that?”

 

“Celestino was their lord, their _God_ , and they believed and then they died and now they’re angry, they were angry _while_ they were dying. If it had gotten into anyone else it could kill you, if it was smart enough and picked the right person, but you’ll be alright.”

 

“Wanna hold my hand and pray a little?”

 

“I don’t need you to help me pray. I still believe, I don’t know anything, I am, I do, I trust. All these souls abandoned their faith and suffered for it, suffering comes from not trusting. When I died, in those hours, no matter how long it was for, the world went on, you went on, your brother, my brother, my killer. Everything I left undone I left behind for someone else, for you or for god or whoever else was there to pick up my burden and it was fine. My dying didn’t _end_ anything. I wasn’t in control then, I’m not now. I’m here, doing what I need to do.”

 

He touches her cheek, tenderly, like a boy her age should have done. “Faith didn’t buy you an afterlife you deserve.” He pulls away from her bloody mouth when she drives forward for his. Her hand seeks his groin, finds it, cups him.

 

He wilts, and she’s like the sun, her clothes are gone, he only sees an insinuation of her nudity, in dreams his eyes don’t find what they want.

 

“Faith is _doing,_ not waiting not judging, it’s just allowing things to happen as they should. It’s that easy. God doesn’t live in a book, his ways are able to be emulated by all, so does it matter? This, what someone else says about it, some words on a page. No.”

 

“…”

 

“If God’s ways can be emulated by anyone then I can still fuck you, or let you fuck me, do what I’ve been chosen to do. They aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be good at something but not really enjoy it, right? That’s you Richie, Breaking into safes, cracking codes.”

 

“Which part wouldn’t you enjoy? Fucking me? Or helping the big guy save some souls?”

 

She lying next to him, dressed in the clothes she died in, face bloodless, gunshot to the guts, her blood has dried on the sheets like clay, her eyes have gone milky.

 

* * *

 

 

They’re in the Twister again, below the surface.

 

He knows Santanico found her. He knows Kate was waiting.

 

“All that time with her, I think about it and it seems like it was longer. I saw her without make-up, I saw her naked, and she wasn’t really like another girl and we weren’t like two people talking. She told me about being born under the days and the stars of special things and the meaning of it all to everyone and how she was a tribute. And then she drank my blood and then she kissed me for a long time. It was being asleep. It wasn’t real. And then I told her I wasn’t going to leave blood behind anymore and she was angry. I think she thought because I’m me that I was going to be easy to get things from, that I’d feel bad for her. But I don’t. You can’t want to control your life and blame the bystander for your misfortune.”

 

“She was his slave.”

 

She rolls her eyes and he wants an explanation.

 

“She was his pet. Like the kind with the owner that goes too far over the top with presents that can’t be appreciated fully. They took her when she was a girl and locked her away. Everything she knows was from men who spoke for the gods who brought people through the temple doors, dirty stinky violent fools who somehow survived long enough to die because she’s hungry.”

 

“…”

 

“It’s not easy for her now, they used to call her Queen, she used to feel like she was important, and she was, to him, but her temple was just a shortcut to satiate the horde.”

 

“She is important.”

 

“You woke her up from the dream that she could make the rules if she just managed to get out.”

 

“She wanted your blood. Why?”

 

There are no real answers in dreams. Not the ones that help, not the ones he needs to survive as King.

 

“She let me touch her, she thought we were making a trade.”

 

She’s sitting on an altar in the labyrinth. There are snakes all over the floor like an Indiana Jones movie. A heap of them so big she puts her bare feet in them like she’s sitting at the edge of a pool. She shivers and he’s excited somehow by it. Then she shudders and he can taste the same coming from her.

 

“She told me about what it was like to be with you. In bed.”

 

He doesn’t know what way she means the words. Her mouth doesn’t smile but her tone has a grin in it.

 

“Both, I guess.”

 

“Kissed a girl and liked it?”

 

“She put her mouth between my legs and told me how good you were when you would do it to her.” He wakes up choking, something in his stomach was coming up his throat, hissing. In his vague fumblings following dreams into real life he tugs at himself, he imagines Kate fucked by snakes. An Eve in the Garden of Eden. He’s wrecked by his orgasm, by the seedy guilt that accompanies it and the pang of arousal coming back around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snake kink needs to be happening more in this fandom I think.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short chapter next one will be too, maybe

He’s gotten what’s he wanted, but it’s rotten. Somewhere along the way he’s changed, more thoroughly than his snakeskin shows.

 

“You’re right where you started,” she says and then adds, “tag line after the headliner.” Her grin looks grim, an awful slash in bright red lipstick against a tan she never used to have.

 

She’s been talking about Seth, he’s been silent on it all, He doesn’t want to talk about his brother. Seth doesn’t agree. Seth can’t see the intricacies of running things, of ruling them. Seth is getting to be unacceptably dickish.

 

“Scott did that. He chose Carlos,” she shrugs, and adds, “for some reason, and I’m never going to be the same again.”

 

There are fires burning in the temple, he touches the treasures thrown over altars, gold splattered with blood, torn fabric of sacrificial dress, feathers, a torn out heart.

 

She walks like a mirror image on the other side of things.

 

Her smile is wry. He lets her do all the talking. “A bully for a brother, that’s what Seth is.” She says it like he wasn't sure of who his brother is.

 

“I did that to Scott, made him resent me, when we were kids, when I killed our dad, when I…,” she stops talking when he holds up his hand.

 

“Resentment is like piss down your legs. You’re the only one who feel it.”

 

Kate smiles, her teeth are sharp, “cowboy wisdom?”

 

"We have a connection, Kate. I killed my dad too, I might bury my brother in the desert, we fucked and fed _Kisa."_  

 

He eats the heart in his hand. She’s beautiful. There’s light in her, glowing like the sun beyond a pigeon egg ruby, it’s a carnivorous kind of light. She’s not naked but he desperately wishes she was, he wishes he could touch her, watch her eat someone’s heart.

 

His mood has been darkening, he’s dreaming about Seth too, his brother’s chest is piecemeal over the altar, there are bloody ribs and the dead thing's chest is a pincushion of gore. She ignores it.

 

"Do you want to drink me up, Richard?" She touches her body it one long gesture like she's offering him a product, something that isn't hers anymore, something that costs her nothing to give.

 

Richie holds up his empty hand, something looks out at her, she looks back.

 

“Come back, Kate.” His gaze is plaintive, "I'm sick of this, I've been waiting around for you."

 

Her gaze has gone blank, obsequious and compliant. His heart beats hard, a solitary thump, he wakes up with the quiet excitement of knowing who is coming to see him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not set out for this to be anything more than a oneshot deal, but here we are

She walks.

 

Sleepless and unchanging.

 

She walks.

 

Cars pass on the highway, snakes uncurl to rattle in the desert, the stars fade into a ruddy sunrise, the world turns.

 

She walks.

 

* * *

 

 

He thinks about what Seth’s face will look like when Kate comes in and sits down.

 

Scott’s the one that sees her, at the bar being told she’s too young to be sitting at it, sees the way she moves without words or argument to a booth.

 

She sits through the waitress asking what she wants, stares ahead at the other side of the red vinyl until she’s told she needs to go, high rollers aren’t served if they can’t order.

 

Seth’s in Tulsa, business, it will be days before he’s back.

 

Scott is the one who sits down across from her, he’s crying angry little boy tears because Kate doesn’t answer to her name anymore.

 

She says she’s waiting, she’s waiting for _Richard_.

 

Because sometimes in his dreams she says Richard in a voice that isn’t hers, breathy and richer, less twang, older, poisonous. In his dreams, the ones that aren’t real, or the ones that are just dreams instead of conversations, she has the voice of a woman who ate his fucking heart, who found him in the woods, who made him a monster.

 

Scott brings her too him, the same way he gave her to Malvado once, without a fight. He wonders how she feels about it now. If she hates, if she's sad, if she wants to hurt him.

 

Richie looks at Scott, he can understand his reaction, the emotions it brings up, the guilt and the grief but it’s white noise, static, all he really _feels_ is his own elation, the private joy of having her back. He needs her. She’s everything he's lost, missed, was so close to having. Sante Sangre, he’ll be a god, the merciful one who provides those who serve with something sweeter than average fare.

 

He needs to control the odds and she was a loose end out on her own.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s silent. She’s supposed to be dead. Her eyes blink red, blink white, blink empty and blind and dead. He’s hungry and starting to drift from the reality of things.

 

Her hair is different, red runs through it, there are purpling ecchymotic patches on her shoulders, her bicep, her flank, the back of her calf, the red ballpoint pinprick of petechiae swells over the stretched out collar of her dirty tank top and over her small breasts.

 

Her nose bleeds, drips over her half-tied sneakers.

 

She shifts her weight on the chair, her face puckering. He can smell the flood of it between her thighs, there’s dry flakes over her ear lobes, the color of rust. When her cracked lips pull in a grimace at his hand pulling her up from the chair her teeth are painted in a gory paint-by-numbers palette.

 

“Being the Blood Well must be like the world’s worst period, huh?”

 

Her eyes shut, she stumbles, clutches at his hand, pulls him down to her level. When she breathes it’s deep and rattling, “got anything to plug this up?” Her hand puts his up under her shirt, there are entry wounds, burned, ragged skin marking the borders, one under the sternum, one in the gut.

 

She smells like life.

 

Her voice is toneless, her words crude, “Unless you were planning on second base.” She pulls his hand to her mouth, “finger licking good.” It sounds like something Seth would say, it’s his brother’s cadence falling from her tongue. He startles and she turns to stone again. She drops to her knees hard, unintentional, he holds her close and she breathes out in smaller, shallower gasps against him.

 

“What’s going on?”

 

“I’m overflowing,” she sounds like Santanico. “It will be over soon and you can lap it up off the floor.” She sounds like Malvado.

 

“You’re being a fucking bitch.”

 

“You called, I came.” Carlos’ sneer is all around the room. “You’re _ungrateful_.” His father hisses.

 

“If you harbor bitterness in your heart there will be no place for happiness to dock.” He tells her.

 

“…”

 

“Saw that on a sign outside a church in Waco.”

 

Kate’s petulant girl huffiness cuts him deeply, “I’m not going to speak to you anymore.”

 

“And we were just about to dig into this heart to heart.”

 

She doesn’t answer, just watches him move around the room after he’s hauled her up and sat her back in the chair. Her blood is on his hands, his shirt cuffs soaked and bleeding further up the starched white lines of his sleeves.

* * *

 

 

A waitress takes her to a room with just a stone tub, big and deep and meant for some orgiastic scene, they fill it around her, hot water and leave her to soak.

 

Below ground there’s only silence. It’s like she’s sleeping.

 

There’s too much water for a blood bath but everything is still turned red.

 

After they take her from it with careful, fast, efficient hands with towels and new clothes and bundle her away to another silent room for her to lie in an equally Olympian bed and not sleep, she knows he’ll strip out of his easily worn suit, take off the glasses he doesn’t need and sink down in the same water that held her.

 

* * *

 

 

He feels like a god. He is a god. Here with it, her blood, it’s easy to see, feel, everything.

 

“You’re supposed to be the smart one.” She’s like a cat, lying across the opposite side of the tub, sinful, nude, red hair, red nails, and a bloody mouth.

 

He splashes, “This is still talking to me, you know?”

 

A different girl, a different Kate sits at his shoulder, wet hair slicked back, calves near his ear, feet pedaling little waves out across the water, her bikini is familiar, “It’s not a good idea to splash around in it.”

 

“Peeing in the pool, Kate?”

 

In triplicate, she’s next to him, fully clothed, on his left side, flannel shirt over her tank top, jeans, sneakers, hair dry until it hits the water, the denim of her thigh chafes his naked hip: “I don’t sweat or cry or piss or get wet anymore.”

 

“Pity.”

 

Something bobs up from below, her corpse treads water from the center of the pool, floating once it’s risen for air, “I’m a vessel. And my blood like this is a conduit.”

 

“…”

 

Across, at the edge, naked and wet she agrees fingers dipping into what's mostly her blood, “Like putting your tongue in a wall socket.”

 

“Consider me warned.”

 

Next to him, crossed arms and waterlogged clothing, “God, you’re _so_ dumb.”

 

“Come here.” He’s talking to the naked one. Hell, he decides,  the bikini version is closer, sitting on the edge, he’d take her if she offered up her body.

 

The first time he saw her says, “This is a dream, you know? A _real_ dream."

 

"That’s not going to help.” She’s talking about the eye in his palm staring at her in her almost modest bikini but the one in flannel scowls down at his erection.

 

He shuts his eyes and says, “If it’s a dream you should be in here, with me, so come here.” He wants her. Not the mirrors of her set around at angles, funhouse reflections, he wants her, all of her.

 

Kate’s corpse sinks lower into the water, terror creeps closer, the suddenly  visible shark fin, “That’s not what you want, not really. Some part of you knows that this is bad for you, you should get out.”

 

“Are you the voice of reason?”

 

The naked one turns over to her back, touching her breasts, the shadow between her thighs, ecstatic, orgasmic, a prismatic dream technicolor snuff film harlot, “I’m sleeping right now, in your _bed_ , this is all you. You’re fucking high. You want me? Come to bed.”

 

“You are so full of shit.”

 

A gun cocks, “Where’s your nerve, you pussy?” It’s Seth, it’s his Father, it’s Scott.

 

Someone pulls the trigger, someone laughs, he wakes up.

* * *

  

He wakes up and drains the tub himself, pours bleach everywhere, he knows how to destroy evidence. He burns out the tub with an 80 proof Bacardi flambé, just to make sure nothing is left of her blood when he’s done.

 

She's in his bed, sleeping, but she's more like the corpse than the first impression he had of her, or the angel in the Winnebago, or the tub slut of his most recent full-grown shameful fantasies.

 

Her blood smells like the desert, dry, hot, desiccating. He'd be lost, he'd be stripped to the bone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heh 'tub slut' I legit crack myself up


	6. Chapter 6

She hasn’t spoken since the first night.

 

Richie doesn't think it's all that strange. She might simply have nothing to say he decides but Scott is full of explanations, ideas, theories, plausible but not any more right than his own insistence that Kate is fine.

 

He looks at her and nothing really looks back.

 

She simply isn’t there.

 

* * *

 

Her blood smells like the iron of an old bank vault, it's nostalgic. His hand aches, splitting open when he thinks about how easy it is to use his gifts and it is easy for it to usurp his headspace. To hold up a hand and tell rather than ask, is simpler than cajoling or bartering, he’s a King, he expects obeisance.

 

He uses it because she doesn’t look at him when he talks, doesn’t talk to him at all, she’s a body like an abandoned house, waiting, falling apart, bank owned and he’s always been a robber on the run. He tells her to rise and walk and do simple things and she does.

 

There’s a new waitress, he calls her to him and she clatters in on heels skyscraper high, he tells her to take them down an inch and a half before the next night’s shift and then he commands without any of his three eyes staring her down. “Help her get ready for bed.”

 

The dangerous little rail of a lounge hostess looks her over. Kate’s open eyes stare back.

 

“She sleeps?”

 

He almost grins, he figures he’s happier, he’s acknowledging the moments where others would do more than stare back, “all the time, can’t you tell.”

 

* * *

 

  

He imagines Santanico and he thinks of Malavdo in the room he sits in. He looks at Kate, he doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t feel sad, there’s nothing but cool level observation, when he sleeps she speaks, in his head, never from her mouth, she says things he’d never think of while awake, sending Seth away comes up often, he’d have felt guilty about it if he hadn’t dreamed it first.

 

Santanico had been a possession of men he wonders if Kate it the same now because of him. He’s a man with a kingdom of his own and nothing is missing. He doesn’t like it as much as he thought he would, is all. He’s changed.

 

She’s naked, dripping water over the stone floor.

 

Her soul is in her blood still but her eyes look at him and see nothing, like so much scenery, like furniture, they don’t always follow him if he moves, they don’t now when he gets up and hands her a towel, leaves an extra one for her hair.

 

He’ll need to tell Seth soon, sending him away has worked well enough but he’s run out of jobs that require fists to faces.

 

He hears her pad off to bed, nude and beautiful leaving damp towels for him to carry to the hamper like a lonely housewife left to clean a mess.

 

* * *

 

 

He hasn’t had her blood yet but he’s been living with the urge inside of him since she was close enough to touch.

 

When he sends his men out to find him someone who knows how to bank blood he knows his quiet existence below Jack Knife’s is at its end, Kate is every cosmic event they had all thought lost, a fluke and a fairytale.

 

She holds out her arm for them to tap her.

 

A bounty of blood and he sits by her side, waiting to see what comes next.

 

Scott wants to know what he’s doing to her.

 

It’s for her own good he tells her brother, he means it.

 

Her blood pours from her into the bag, like oil from the earth, almost endless in its supply. Oil, he knows, is made from dead things, decay, primeval vegetation and dinosaur rot, pressure, heat, black gold.

 

Her blood is a fount of dead things.

 

Days later her body opens around where she was shot, she bleeds from everywhere a body can bleed, overripe fruit. She’s meant to be punctured.

 

He hasn’t tasted it yet but thinking about it heralds a physical sensation, his spine purring, his gums throbbing around achy fangs, his own blood spins through him like its run by a turbine.

 

His cock is some ungodly thing, always hard, leaking against the inside of his slacks.

 

Eyes find eyes and he wonders if she can smell him like he can smell her in his dreams.

 

* * *

 

He's angry when he bites her. He's been starving himself for days knowing what it would come to, he's called it building up his tolerance or training or learning some discipline but really it's only been about getting hungry enough to sink fangs into her and be able to blame it on something, an unstoppable _urge_.

 

His venom starts her heart, he hadn’t realized it stopped, it makes her gasp, her body flush and her limbs thrash, it won’t turn her but it does make her feel alive. She cries, because she suddenly can again. Her small, hot mouth opens over his and her body is fast and sure, climbing into his lap and never not moving against him.

 

She can’t keep still and he won’t put hands on her or arms around her.

 

“Never been high before?”

 

She comes down from it like a junkie and then she’s still. He wonders why he didn’t fuck her. She lies on the floor at his feet, eyes open, staring at the ceiling like it’s the inside of a casket.

 

He can hear Seth come crashing through the floors, the long way down. His brother goes down on his knees, checks Kate’s throat, her wrists, he wants a pulse, he can’t find one. Not right away. Her eyes move and Seth stifles a scream. Barely.

 

A moment too late for it to matter he tells his brother’s jackrabbit heart and staccato breathlessness, “Don’t worry, she’s alive. I checked.”

 

The words hit Seth and crease his brow. The implication of them make him turn into something dangerous. Seth thinks he’s fucked her, drank from her, hurt her. Checking how alive someone is not the same procedure every time and he did drink her down, she tastes like a solar flare and cordite.

 

For all he knows someone has gotten to her first, taken away her precious useless gift of lily white chastity. He’s barely gotten a mouthful of what’s swimming through her, he’s afraid of it, he remembers Carlos’ loss of control. She can’t be hurt by anyone, not anymore.

 

He’s done none of the things Seth's had had a better chance to when she was still a real girl.

 

Seth shakes her, the way you shouldn’t shake someone who might be injured.

 

“She checked out, first night she came she talked, bled everywhere. Now, it’s this.”

 

“Fuck you, Richard.” Seth’s voice shakes, he rises to swing.

 

Richie steps and shrugs away from the blow. It wouldn’t have hurt but he’s too old, too much bigger than his brother to allow for even glancing fists to touch him anymore.

 

She gets up on her own two feet and walks away from them.

 

Scott stands at the end of the long room, his face so painfully open in its optimism, its joy as she comes closer, but Kate walks by him and leaves them all standing in a room that’s run dry of hope in her absence.

 

It’s funny, Richie thinks, when she’s left, in the elevator, going up for air. It’s funny because the room feels fuller now that she isn’t in it.

 

“That’s not Kate anymore. It’s a god damn void.” Seth tells them, huffy and sad.

 

No one believes it, but it’s business as usual for as long as they can all pretend it’s the truth.

 

Richie knows that as far as voids go whatever Kate was, her soul maybe, was emptied out, her body left over, she might have been a void then, until something came a filled her up. A thousand souls fill more than just a void.

 

* * *

 

 

He dreams.

 

“Who is it that gets a place promised to them in heaven? The only one Jesus actually promises a place to?”

 

“You know, I know,” she drawls.

 

“A thief.”

 

“You know that for sure?” She probes.

 

“No, I heard it on one of those three to four in the morning sermons.”

 

Her teeth look sharp in the dark, he doesn’t see her in waves of heat like he would in the dark of the real world, he just sees her, parts of her, her teeth shiny in the dark, the green of her cat marble eyes. She makes no sound of understanding.

 

He goes on, “The ones after the infomercials for OxyClean and SlapChop.”

 

Her head tilts, “The woman? In the suit, with the sister wife hair?”

 

“Yeah. She kind of looks like you, like an older sister maybe, or your mother. I’d ride her.” He shrugs.

 

“Classy.”

 

“You going to sleep your life away like this, Kate?”

 

She barely blinks, “Do you know what you’re brother told me when we left the twister? He told me to forget about mine because he was dead, and even if he was still alive he was dead. Maybe you should forget about me.”

 

“You didn’t forget me, Kate.”

 

“Maybe I should have.”


End file.
